Space scientists capture never before seen cosmic spiral

By Dean Murray

Space scientists have captured a never-before-seen cosmic spiral.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has taken a jaw-dropping image of a system of four serpentine spirals of dust.

Observations taken prior to Webb only detected one shell in a system known as Apep, and while the existence of outer shells was hypothesized, searches using ground-based telescopes were unable to uncover any.

These shells were emitted over the last 700 years by two aging Wolf-Rayet stars in the system named after the Egyptian serpent god of chaos.

Researchers say the dust-producing stars in Apep are sending out dust at 1,200 to 2,000 miles per second.

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Webb’s image, combined with several years of data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, narrowed down how often the pair swing by one another: once every 190 years. Over each incredibly long orbit, they pass closely for 25 years and form dust.

Yinuo Han, lead author of a paper in The Astrophysical Journal, said: "Looking at Webb’s new observations was like walking into a dark room and switching on the light — everything came into view.

"There is dust everywhere in Webb’s image, and the telescope shows that most of it was cast off in repetitive, predictable structures."

Han’s paper coincides with the publication of Ryan White’s paper in The Astrophysical Journal, a PhD student at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

Han, White, and their co-authors refined the Wolf-Rayet stars’ orbit by combining precise measurements of the ring location from Webb’s image with the speed of the shells’ expansion from observations taken by the VLT over eight years.

“This is a one-of-a-kind system with an incredibly rare orbital period,” White said. “The next longest orbit for a dusty Wolf-Rayet binary is about 30 years. Most have orbits between two and 10 years.”